Maximizing VMware vRealize Operations · Maximizing Capacity Analysis with vROps 66 Maximize Troubleshooting with vROps 68 Summary 72. iv Chapter 4 73 Maximizing vRealize Operations

G E T T I N G S TA RT E D W IT H V M WA R E V R E A L I z E O P E R AT I O N S 9

Many organizations are missing crucial information about their data

centers For example they donrsquot understand how their applications

are performing today they donrsquot have a capacity plan for the future

and when trouble happens they blindly restart software and hardware

in hopes of returning the applications to the status quo

All of these are a sign of a data center management group that doesnrsquot

have any intelligence around their data center operations Itrsquos no

secret that modern data centers are complex so it makes sense that

yoursquod need intelligent tools to manage such an environment vROps

is the tool both now and in the future that you should be using to

manage your complex modern data center

With the release of vROps 67 VMware has updated their description

of vROps by stating that it provides ldquoSelf-Driving Operationsrdquo This

is an important addition to the description of ldquoIntelligent Operationsrdquo

that itrsquos always provided Wersquoll learn more about this ldquoself-drivingrdquo

data center later in the book when we cover maximizing vROps

How Does vRealize Operations WorkvROps deploys as a virtual appliance into a vSphere infrastructure

That virtual appliance includes both the database and the analysis

engine The integrated database stores collected data the analysis

engine presents that data to you intelligently and alerts you to what

you need to know The vROps virtual appliance connects to VMware

vCenter to learn about the vSphere infrastructure hosts clusters

virtual machines (VMs) virtual networks and datastores

It can also communicate with other data sources like applications

databases servers networks and much more vROps is designed

to be able to pull data from just about anywhere and correlate that

data with other data sources to give you a holistic view of whatrsquos

happening in the data center Wersquoll go more into vROps architecture

in a later chapter

G E T T I N G S TA RT E D W IT H V M WA R E V R E A L I z E O P E R AT I O N S 1 0

5 Reasons You Need a Virtualization Performance and Capacity Management Tool1 Maximize VM density Servers now have

massive CPU and memory density This gives

them the ability to run more virtual machines (VMs)

than yoursquove ever likely run before on a single server

Even if the potential number of VMs exceeds your comfort level itrsquos

your job as a virtualization admin to push that hardware to the limits to

maximize your companyrsquos IT investment But how do you know what that

number is Just because one company can run 100 VMs on a server doesnrsquot

mean that your servers can

The only way to find out what that number is for your particular servers

and your companyrsquos specific applications is to slowly increase that

number until your intelligent tool tells you to stop (which will be before

applications see slowness) Maximizing VM density isnrsquot something that

you should try to do without the right analytics tools in place

2 Prevent bottlenecks and downtime Virtual infrastructure can and

will hit resource bottlenecks and itrsquos your job to prevent that before they

degrade application performance or cause application downtime This can

be tough to do without a tool thatrsquos monitoring your resource utilization

247 keeping a history and making recommendations

3 Correlate events and changes With more complex virtual infrastructure

comes multiple administrators and multiple changes Itrsquos critical to have a

system that tracks those changes and correlates them with system events

andor performance issues This way when unexpected downtime or

performance bottlenecks occur they can quickly be tied back to events

and changes that may be the root cause

G E T T I N G S TA RT E D W IT H V M WA R E V R E A L I z E O P E R AT I O N S 1 1

4 Plan capacity growth Most workloads tend to grow over time as the

usercustomer base of those applications grows The virtualization admin

needs to be able to predict that growth before the virtual infrastructure

runs out of capacity

This foresight is important since adding new capacity to the virtual

infrastructure may require physical capacity (pCPU pRAM or pDisk)

that takes time to purchase and add to the cluster Your virtualization

management tool must monitor the workloads of your applications over

time and be able to predict when additional capacity is needed alerting

you even months ahead of time

5 Achieve a unified view Too many so-called virtualization

management tools monitor the virtual infrastructure with only insight

from SNMP element monitoring or with only basic information from

the vCenter API You need a tool that offers a unified view gained from

a rich and extensible wealth of data

For example your virtualization management tool should have

the ability to communicate directly with storage arrays for storage

insight it should have application insight into Tier 1 applications and

it should be able to provide insight into the hybrid cloud when your

company is ready to migrate workloads

G E T T I N G S TA RT E D W IT H V M WA R E V R E A L I z E O P E R AT I O N S 1 2

In the past when virtual infrastructures were smaller more static

and less complex analysis using only vCenter was adequate for most

companies They didnrsquot feel the need to push their utilization levels

as they were satisfied with consolidating 10 or 20 VMs on a server

(thatrsquos not hard to understand when compared to the 11 OS-to-

server ratio they were running with physical servers)

Today enterprises can be running hundreds of VMs on each host

and pushing the VM-to-host ratio to the maximum to squeeze

every penny out of their data center investment Additionally many

companies are using desktop virtualization and more complex multi-

tiered applications than in the past

While the adoption of virtualization management tools has increased

those tools havenrsquot always proven to be worthwhile (or in some cases

these tools are even ignored by administrators) Some enterprises have

managed their virtual infrastructure with vCenter and command-line

tools for years and believe that therersquos no need to add another tool

And still others are using a third-party tool that just wasnrsquot designed

with virtualization in mind such as an element-monitoring tool

In just about all these cases the enterprise doesnrsquot realize what

theyrsquore missing until itrsquos too late Unfortunately too many of those

companies donrsquot understand that their existing tools arenrsquot up to

the job until theyrsquore trying to troubleshoot an application slowdown

or even worse a virtual infrastructure outage

For those who need a reminder of why vROps Management Suite is so

necessary in todayrsquos data centers or what makes vROps so valuable in

todayrsquos data center read on

G E T T I N G S TA RT E D W IT H V M WA R E V R E A L I z E O P E R AT I O N S 1 3

Understanding vRealize Operations EditionsBefore you start using vROps there are a few things you should know

The most important thing to know is that itrsquos easy Assuming you

already have VMware vSphere you can download the free 60-day trial

of vROps deploy it and be up and running in less than 15 minutes

Wersquoll walk you step-by-step through the deployment later in this

book If you want to try vROps without a download you can do that

in a live lab environment with the VMware Hands-On Labs (covered

in the next section)

Before you kick off your deployment letrsquos review some of the ldquomust-

knowsrdquo of vROps starting with how itrsquos packaged and licensed

vROps is offered in three editions Standard Advanced and Enterprise

Whatrsquos common across all editions is that they include vROps

performance monitoring analytics predictive capacity management

predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (pDRS) vRealize Log

Insight and vSAN integration

vRealize Operations is also included in bundles such as the vRealize

Suite the vCloud Suite and vSphere with Operations Management

Enterprise Plus

Traditionally vROps has been licensed per CPU but recently VMware

announced a new licensing option called hybrid cloud portable

licensing which offers the flexibility to manage workloads whether

theyrsquore on-premises third-party hypervisors physical servers or

supported public clouds

The benefit of the portable license unit (PLU) licensing model is that

therersquos no license switching or conversion required The PLU allows

usage of vROps to manage unlimited operating system instances (OSI)

deployed on-premises on one vSphere CPU or up to 15 OSIs deployed

on the public cloud It includes VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) all